The race for reparation(s), the (im)possibility of repair in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull

Bibliographic Data

ID12786958
AuthorsAretha Phiri (0000-0002-1204-8779, Rhodes University, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume21
Issue1
Pages69-84
Publication date2020-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSafundi (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1543-1304 • E-ISSN: 1753-3171
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17533171.2020.1698695
OpenAlexW2998291634
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited36

Demands for reparations led by African American communities for centuries of enslavement parallel calls by the South African state for the reparation of socioeconomic disadvantage rooted in colonial and apartheid pasts. Where such appeals are necessary and legitimate within a broader context of social redress and reconciliation, a comparative, relational reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) extends normative ideologies of reparations to include a critical engagement with existential reparation. This paper offers a literary exploration of the efficacy of reparations in overcoming legacies of racial discrimination and disadvantage. It argues further argues that Beloved and Country of My Skull’s creative representations of the tension between healing/repair and irreparable woundedness do not just engage chronic black ontological precarity; their narrative interrogation of (the possibility of) existential reparation problematizes (historically) conventional identitarian processes and advances morally responsive and socially transformative ways of being in the world

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Existentialism · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Redress · Sociology · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture